The Way of the Hermit

By Ken Smith

☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎

I'm a people person, a professional talker. As I get older, I'm trying to appreciate the stillness of silence more, and seek it out. This book felt like a meditation on what it means to be content.

Ken's journey is essentially one about opting out of the traditional life. IInstead, he prioritized finding himself and what he wanted from a young age. Without revealing too much, after an accident, he quit his job and went to the Yukon, where he learned to survive in the northwest. But more than that, he learned the land, listened to the wildlife, and stayed curious enough to keep asking the questions that let him build something sustainable. He's been there roughly four decades, and the book is drawn from the diaries he kept the whole time.

What I loved is that Ken's story is continually iterative. There's no arc where he achieves something or proves anyone wrong or arrives at enlightenment on a mountaintop. He fishes, he chops wood, he brews something questionable, he writes down the weather. The book's entire argument is that this is sufficient, and it makes that argument by simply describing forty years of it without ever once getting bored of itself. I didn't know how badly I needed to read something so absolutely content.

And the gratitude in here is the real kind, which is to say it's completely unperformed. We've turned gratitude into a product, the journals, the prompts, the five-things-every-morning. Ken isn't doing an exercise. He's grateful because he pays attention, all day, to a very small amount of ground. That's the actual mechanism, and it's much less marketable than the version we're sold, because it requires the one thing nobody wants to spend, time in one place.

four cups. read it slowly. it isn't going anywhere and neither should you.